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November 4, 2022

Some years ago, I visited an aquarium in Monterey, California.  At first glance, it seemed like an interesting place, but sadly, I’m one of those people who read the entire sign explaining each exhibit.

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After reading a few signs, I realized that each was a composition using a few words to describe the critter in the tank and progressing into a sad description of how man’s actions — or even just man’s presence on the planet — was causing trouble for the creature on display.  In short, it was one guilt trip after another, until I finally got the message and stopped reading the signs.

If it had been just one aquarium, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.  But this theme is repeated in many places these days.  It is so pervasive that years ago I nicknamed it the Guilt Trip Travel Agency.

My father taught me many valuable things.  Perhaps the most important of all of them was his statement that “you should never trust anyone who tries to motivate you using fear.” 

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If you study the dynamics of the COVID “panic-demic,” you will see that many people in high places effectively used fear to motivate and control large populations whom they deemed too ignorant to think and act for themselves.  When fear was not effective enough, they used COVID “passports,” job loss, shame, and restricted access to beat the people into submission.  All of these things worked well if they could play on the ignorance of the population they wished to suppress. 

Eventually, fear failed them because the vaccines were neither effective nor safe.  Guilt (“if you don’t, you’re putting yourself and all other people at unnecessary risk”) failed them as well because the vaccines did not prevent transmission.  Eventually, they had to resort to one of the nastiest tools in the control freak’s tool box: coercion.  “You will do it because I said you must.  If you don’t do it, I will punish you and make your life hell.”  Sadly, that worked fairly well.

One of the leveraging components that aided all of these control measures was ignorance.  It is easy to lie to people if they are ignorant of the matters under consideration.  How much medical wisdom do most of us have compared to the training and experience of a person with an M.D.?  The people who wish to control our thoughts and actions are doing all this for our own good, aren’t they?  Aren’t they?  Don’t they know best? 

Who can say if the COVID panic-demic is over?  The control freaks seem to have played it for all it was worth and then some.  The next new great thing is (once again) “global warming” or maybe “global cooling,” or, to cover all bases, “climate change.”  Look for the fear.  Look for the guilt.  Look for the shame.  “Aren’t you ashamed to be a human, ruining our planet?”

I’m no doctor (of anything), but saving energy was a major focus of my job.  People paid me to do that for 29 years.  Here I offer the basic concepts you need to prevent the control freaks from playing on your ignorance in the global warming game.

1. The quality of human life is proportional to the per capita expenditure of energy.  At the moment — and perhaps for at least the next century — that energy will come mainly from fossil fuels.